Reduction of Design Variables for Automated Optimization of Injection Mold Cooling Circuit

The injection mold cooling circuit optimization was studied with a response surface method in the previous research. It took so much time to find an optimum solution for a large product due to an extensive amount of calculation time for the CAE analysis. In order to use the optimization technique in the actual design process, the calculation time should be much reduced. In this study, we tried to reduce the number of design variables with the concept of the close relationship between the depth and the distance of cooling channel. The optimum ratio of the distance to the depth of cooling channels for a 2-dimensional problem was 2.0 so that the optimum ratio was again sought out for 4 large automotive parts. Therefore, the number of design variables for the cooling circuit optimization can be reduced in half, resulting in much faster running time for the optimization as a design tool.